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Too Much Democracy? Primaries and Candidate Success in the 2006 Mexican National Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Kathleen Bruhn
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Abstracts

Do primaries help political parties perform better in general elections, or do they undermine electoral performance by contributing to internal divisions and to the weakening of party organizations? This article examines the effect of holding a primary on the general election prospects of candidates, using cases from two of the three major parties in Mexico's 2006 national legislative elections. In both parties, primaries fail to systematically produce candidates with advantages in the general election, due largely to organizational deficits of the parties and low entry requirements for aspiring precandidates. Indeed, outside urban centers, where parties tend to be better organized, primaries actually seem to hurt party performance in subsequent general elections.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 25 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 2010

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